Friday, July 25, 2008
.....And Down Again!
The markets went sharply lower again Thursday. The Dow lost 283.10 points to close the session at 11,349.28. The SPX gave up 29.65 points to end on 1,252.54.
The catalyst was very poor earnings news from Ford and some bad economic data.
Economic data Thursday did little to ease concerns about inflation and economic slowing. Jobless claims rose above 400K, though the Labor Department noted that there were many factors involved.
The housing sector has been a very big part of the problems in the economy and this continued to be evident in the release of existing home sales data for June. Sales of existing homes fell 2.6 percent to an annualized rate of 4.86 million units. This was worse than expected and put the year on year decline at 15.5 percent. Supply rose to 11.1 months at current sales rates, up from 10.8 in May. Even so, the median price of a home rose 3.5 percent to $215,100, but in the past year, home prices are down 6.1 percent.
Until next time.
The catalyst was very poor earnings news from Ford and some bad economic data.
Economic data Thursday did little to ease concerns about inflation and economic slowing. Jobless claims rose above 400K, though the Labor Department noted that there were many factors involved.
The housing sector has been a very big part of the problems in the economy and this continued to be evident in the release of existing home sales data for June. Sales of existing homes fell 2.6 percent to an annualized rate of 4.86 million units. This was worse than expected and put the year on year decline at 15.5 percent. Supply rose to 11.1 months at current sales rates, up from 10.8 in May. Even so, the median price of a home rose 3.5 percent to $215,100, but in the past year, home prices are down 6.1 percent.
Until next time.
# posted by Paul @ 1:06 PM 
